Crash Course, No. 39: DEVO, The Art School Project that Got Real Big

I was witnessing genius...

I had a very satisfying project called One Hit No More, and that’s what steered me to DEVO. At the same time, hitting DEVO put that project into the realm of bands I grew up with, aka, bands I know fairly well. And DEVO fits that better than most.

Having grown up on early (the earliest, in fact) MTV, I couldn’t wrap my head around DEVO as a “one-hit wonder.” Part of that followed from the fact that MTV playe a lot of DEVO; between “Through Being Cool,” “Beautiful World,” “Love Without Anger,” “Freedom of Choice,” and “Satisfaction,” it simply never occurred to me that “Whip It” was their only Top 40 hit.

And that was despite all the visibly weird shit/themes they presented and played with. I remember watching it, understanding it was different, but, young as I was - their prime years hit when I was 9-11 years old - all of it went over my head. So, let’s fill in some blanks.

Somewhat Briefly
“…here are the five basic components of the Devolutionary Oath:

1. Wear gaudy colors or avoid display
2. Lay a million eggs or give birth to one
3. The littlest may survive & the unfit may live
4. Be like your ancestors or be different
5. We must repeat”

Even if I, like everyone from DEVO, came from Ohio, I had no hope of wrapping my head around that. Then again, they had quite the head start…

The main members of DEVO - Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale - met at Kent State, when Kent State was Kent State, i.e., Casale was present for the university’s most infamous moment, saw his friends die, and lived through the hyper-reactionary backlash. Suffice to say, it changed him:

“Until then I was a hippie. I thought that the world is essentially good. If people were evil, there was justice and that the law mattered. All of those silly naïve things. I saw the depths of the horrors and lies and the evil. In the paper that evening, the Akron Beacon Journal, said that students were running around armed and that officers had been hurt. So deputy sheriffs went out and deputized citizens. They drove around with shotguns and there was martial law for ten days. 7 PM curfew. It was open season the students. We lived in fear.”

One Hit No More, No. 100(!): The Itinerant Zelig Behind M and "Pop Muzik"

A Persona.

The Hit
The biggest surprise I found in researching M’s 1979 hit, “Pop Muzik,” was that the man behind, Robin Scott, first tried to record it as either R&B or funk. That detail comes from Stereogum's entry in on M in its (and very good) series on No. 1 hits. As noted in the same piece, Scott cleared out the analog instruments and started working with keyboards to create “an otherworldly synthetic take on the song that was inspired…by Donna Summer.” It also contains an old quote on the inspiration for the single:

“Scott later said that he envisioned himself speaking as a disco DJ, floating above the crowd and making ridiculous voice-of-God statements. Talking to Melody Maker at the time, he explained, ‘I get the feeling that people want to know that someone is in control. I see everybody in the disco like being in an enormous army which is waiting to be told what to do. They’ve all rallied under this call, and now they’re sweating out their hang-ups there.’”

For anyone wanting to dive…pretty damn deep into Scott’s life, influences and process, a site called Discog Info mined all sorts of old quotes that get into all that, but the Stereogum piece does the best work both placing “Pop Muzik” in time and breaking it down. It calls it the first true new wave song to hit No. 1- a fair call based on the competition, Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” (more on Blondie here) and The Knack’s “My Sharona” (more on The Knack here) - and it makes a strong case for the future-forward originality of the song’s style and structure:

“A mechanistic drum pounds out a steady, basic thump. Keyboards make noises — blips, pings, squirts, hums — that sound strange and spartan and alien while still somehow resolving into catchy melodies. A British man deadpans absurdist non-sequiturs, sounding bored but also excited by his own boredom.”

That sums it up better than I ever will. And now…

The Rest of the Story
Robin Scott never lacked for interesting associations. Born in Croydon, Surrey, UK, in 1947, he attended Croydon Art College where he started a long friendship with the future Svengali of English punk, Malcolm McLaren, and another collaborator, Vivienne Westwood. Though he did do some work with McLaren - e.g., he told Music Hit Box in a circa-2017interview that he helped them develop ideas for the “Let It Rock” boutique, though Wikipedia’s entry says he passed on the chance to work with them at the Chelsea fashion shop SEX - Scott committed to music early, and in one form after another.